Chasing My Tail

Monday, January 13, 2014

I promised Judith that I would go for a walk with her Sunday as R&R after Saturday's race. But high winds and a touch of DOMS for me discouraged both of us. I opted for some stretching, self massage and a long hot bath. Judith did her stint on the treadmill. She is on the Where Are You Walking To? SparkTeam. So today she reminded me that I owed her a walk. I had planned on running a half marathon to meet my Strava.com January Challenge. We compromised. She would walk a 10K. I would do fartleks looping her every quarter mile. I'd see her safe home and make up whatever I needed to wind up the HM.

The whole thing worked out very well. She wants to do it again and so do I. I covered twelve miles running in the time she covered six walking. Then there was just a little tail before I was done. My time was almost the same as my first HM race time in May of 2012. I don't think there was ever more than about seven minutes between opportunities for Judith and I to encourage each other.

I think I've done enough work building my endurance for long slow runs. This year I want to see if I can break a seven minute mile and these cooperative efforts should give me the chance to work on that. I can do my sprints uphill, turn around and take it easier downhill. The fact that Judith is walking toward me will keep my downhills shorter than my sprints.

Suggestions are more than welcome from people who understand these things.

HAKAPES
I would investigate a bit more about the training types, lactate levels, and training with a heart rate monitor, to train different types of muscle.If you don't do HIIT training, I had a good experience with it. My speed went up very fast, also for the longer runs.Otherwise, I love the consistency in the way you do all this training!1031 days ago

MOBYCARP
I can't claim to really understand speed work, but everything I've read says you do intervals to work on speed. I haven't actually tried to work on speed, but I've done a lot of walk/run intervals as recovery from injury. Every time, I've come out of the period doing intervals faster than I was before the injury.

I'd guess that you have a good plan here. You're going to intervals, and do them in a way that keeps you interested in what you're doing and motivated to keep doing them. It ought to help your speed, right?

The other thing that some people have told me is that training hills helps with speed. I can't claim certain knowledge that this is correct, but running hills hasn't hurt my speed. And you have hills in there. They can't hurt, and might help.1061 days ago